One of the issues in publishing through a small publishing house, like McFarland & Co, is it is up to me to procure the illustrations and photographs to accompany the manuscript, and pay for them. It is wild how much the prices vary from archive to archive. By way of example, I was looking for a photograph of William Zeckendorf, a Tucson merchant who was instrumental in the capture and the justice meted out to the murderers of Vincente “Jose” Hernandez, a.k.a. Piedras Negras

I was writing articles about Gila County history for the Payson Roundup awhile back, but they decided to go with more local histories. Well, I guess they ran out of good stories about Payson. Nothing really ever happened here during the territorial era. The history of Payson is just a bunch of ranchers watching their cattle and an occasional prospector looking for traces of gold (which they rarely found). It is a history which is really only of interest to the descendants of

The other day, I was trying to recall the date of the Hernandez-Chaves murders in Tucson. If you do not know the story, Vincente “Jose” Hernandez and his wife, Librada Chaves were murdered in their bedroom in Tucson by burglars on the night of August 6th - 7th, 1873. They were bludgeoned to death with a club made of mesquite wood, and had their throats cut. The perpetrators of the crime -  Jesus Saguaripa, Leocardo Cordova, and Clemente Lopez were captured within twenty-four

Spent a good portion of last week in Las Cruces, New Mexico attending the New Mexico - Arizona History Conference. Submitted my paper...